It's a mobile world after all

This week I'm covering Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and it got me thinking about the profound impact mobile has had on content management as a market. It really has completely altered the way we think about managing content.

That's because instead of documents solely living inside the confines of the company firewall, displayed on PC monitor, we have more dynamic content with a life in the world. Today's content moves around, and that has had a huge effect on our ability to control that content, perhaps making content management more relevant than ever because it's gotten just so much more complex.

Not only does the content move, but we also have to display it on an ever-changing array of devices and screen sizes and we are moving from computers to phones to tablets to wearables to our cars--and the content has to move with us.

It's changed how we think of content management. Where once we had our records and our documents, today we have content coming from a variety of sources. We have a volume we never dreamed of back in the 90s and we have the need to deliver that content in context to wherever the customer or user happens to be on whatever device they happen to be using.

It's much more complicated and it wasn't easy before--and it's forcing us to redefine how we think of content and content management. We want to use content to drive the customer's experience based on what we know about them--and that's extremely challenging.

I'll be thinking about all of this as I walk the corridors at MWC this week, and while there are a variety of vendors, and it's not a content management-focused conference, when it comes to mobile, you can't help but see the relationship between the devices, the content and the backend management and delivery of that content. It's all inter-related whether we call it content management or not.

There are more devices and more ways of delivering content than ever before and this requires a new way of thinking about how we manage our content. We can't pretend that it's not leaving the firewall when we know very well that it is--and has been for some time.

This forces us to create workflows that can be flexible enough to handle new and changing ways of delivering the content. We can't afford to use rigid systems that require a new template for each delivery method because as we get an ever-increasing number of devices, operating systems, screen sizes and delivery methods; we need to have more flexible ways of managing and delivering that content however the user and the device requires.

It's all tremendously challenging, and as I roam the halls and talk to vendors and listen to the keynotes, I'll be keeping this in mind and thinking about the impact it has on content, content delivery and content management because one thing is for certain: It truly is a mobile world after all. - Ron

THE LIBRARY: WHITEPAPER

The democratization of data is the process of expanding business information and the tools to analyze it out to a much broader audience than traditionally has had access. Evolving and complex technology landscapes compounded these limitations, as disconnected systems made it more difficult to get a unified view of the business. Many companies still struggle to get a single version of the truth across all areas of the enterprise. Learn more!